In October 2011, Boaz Almog demonstrated how a superconducting disk can be trapped in a surrounding magnetic field to levitate above it, a phenomenon called “quantum levitation.” This demonstration, seemingly taken from a sci-fi movie, is the result of many years of R&D on high-quality superconductors. By using exceptional superconductors cooled in liquid nitrogen, Almog and his colleague Mishael Azoulay at the superconductivity group at Tel Aviv University (lead by Prof. Guy Deutscher) were able to demonstrate a quantum effect that, although well known to physicists worldwide, had never been seen and demonstrated in such a compelling way.

Experiment credits:

Prof. Guy Deutscher, Mishael Azoulay and Boaz AlmogHigh Tc Superconductivity Group School of Physics and AstronomyTel Aviv University

Michael Anti (Zhao Jing), a key figure in China's new journalism, explores the growing power of the Chinese internet.

One morning in 2011, Michael Anti woke up to find himself a nonperson: His Facebook profile, with 1,000+ contacts, had been suspended. Anti, whose given name is Zhao Jing, ran up against Facebook's real-name policy--but he points out that for Chinese bloggers and information activists, the pseudonym is an important protection for the free exchange of information.

Facebook itself is blocked in China (along with Twitter and YouTube), but the country boasts some 500 million netizens--including 200 million microbloggers on sites like Sina Weibo, a freewheeling though monitored platform for text and photo updates that offers, perhaps for the first time, a space for public debate in China. It's not a western-style space, Anti clarifies, but for China it is revolutionary: It's the first national public sphere. Microblogs' role became clear in the wake of the high-speed train crash in Wenzhou in 2011, when Weibo became a locus of activism and complaint--and a backchannel that refuted official reports and has continued to play a key role in more recent events.

Vicki Arroyo uses environmental law and her background in biology and ecology to help prepare for global climate change.

The climate is quickly changing. Scientists increasingly talk of a new period in the Earth's history, the "anthropocene", in which human impact on the planet has become dominant. Yet we remain unprepared to deal with the consequences: specifically, the disruption and cost. Lawyer Vicki Arroyo, the executive director of the Georgetown Climate Center, works on climate mitigation and adaptation policies as viable solutions to climate change’s inevitable disruptions to current practices. Using the best available science, Arroyo collaborates with US policymakers at both the state and federal level to develop "planetary management" strategies.

Computer-based interactivity used to be beyond the reach of most artists, designers, and other electronics amateurs who wanted to make their work respond to light, sound and other stimulus by moving, beeping, tweeting. Then, in 2005, Italian engineer Massimo Banzi and his team created the Arduino microcontroller, a small, cheap programmable computer, bringing interactive technology to the masses.

With a variety of sensors, the Arduino is versatile and easy to use. Since its inception, the device has popped up in projects as varied as an exhibit on brains at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, to a DIY kit that sends a Tweet when your houseplant needs water.

A four-time Tony nominee, theater producer David Binder is interested in taking performances off the stage.

David Binder produced the Tony-winning Broadway revival of A Raisin in the Sun, with Sean Combs, Phylicia Rashad and Audra McDonald, and the Broadway premiere of 33 Variations with Jane Fonda. However, he is equally well-known for his Off Broadway accomplishments, including producing the rowdy rock musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch and De la Guarda, a high-energy show with performers hanging from the venue ceiling and walls.

Binder has also staged events and festivals around the globe, including The High Line Festival (which was curated by David Bowie),The New Island Festival (ten days of Dutch-specific theater, dance and music in New York City) and IBM's 100th Anniversary: Short Ride in a Fast Machine (held at Lincoln Center).

Mina Bissell studies how cancer interacts with our bodies, searching for clues to how cancer's microenvironment influences its growth.

Mina Bissell's groundbreaking research has proven that cancer is not only caused by cancer cells. It is caused by an interaction between cancer cells and the surrounding cellular micro-environment. In healthy bodies, normal tissue homeostasis and architecture inhibit the progression of cancers. But changes in the microenvironment--following an injury or a wound for instance--can shift the balance. This explains why many people harbor potentially malignant tumors in their bodies without knowing it and never develop cancer, and why tumors often develop when tissue is damaged or when the immune system is suppressed.

The converse can also be true. In a landmark 1997 experiment, mutated mammary cells, when dosed with an antibody and placed into a normal cellular micro-environment, behaved normally. This powerful insight from Bissell's lab may lead to new ways of treating existing and preventing potential cancers.

Sarah-Jayne Blakemore studies the social brain -- the network of brain regions involved in understanding other people -- and how it develops in adolescents.

Remember being a teenager? Rocked internally with hormones, outwardly with social pressures, you sometimes wondered what was going on in your head. So does Sarah-Jayne Blakemore. And what she and others in her field are finding is: The adolescent brain really is different.

New brain imaging research and clever experiments are revealing how the cortex develops -- the executive part of the brain that handles things like planning, self-awareness, analysis of consequences and behavioral choices. It turns out that these regions develop more slowly during adolescence, and in fascinating ways that relate to risk-taking, peer pressure and learning.

Which leads to a bigger question: How can we better target education to speak to teenagers' growing, changing brains?

For his new book, "Tubes," Andrew Blum visited the places where the internet exists in physical form: the cables and switches and servers that virtually connect us.

In his book Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet, Andrew Blum wanted to capture the "spirit of place" of the Internet. Because as far-reaching and virtual as our connection to the Net is, the signals travel on good old-fashioned cabling, glass fibers jacketed in polymer, running through conduit under streets. The immaterial Internet runs on a very material, industry-like infrastructure. So that when Alaska senator Ted Stevens called the Internet "a series of tubes" ... well, he was kind of right, and he did inspire the title of this utterly fascinating book, which explores the switches, data centers, sea crossings and many, many tubes that make up our online reality.

Blum is a writer for Newsweek, and has written for Wired, Popular Science, Metropolis and more.

Rachel Botsman writes and speaks on the power of collaboration and sharing through network technologies, and on how it will transform business, consumerism and the way we live.

Rachel Botsman is the co-author, with Roo Rogers, of the book What's Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption, and she writes, consults and speaks on the power of collaboration and sharing through network technologies, and on how it will transform business, consumerism and the way we live. Her new work focuses on trust and reputation capital.

She is the founder of The Collaborative Lab, an innovation incubator that works with startups, big businesses and local governments to deliver innovative solutions based on the ideas of Collaborative Consumption. She has consulted to Fortune 500 companies and leading nonprofit organizations around the world on brand and innovation strategy, and was a former director at the William J. Clinton Foundation.

How lucky we are, those of us who find what we love early on. The daughter of a Chinese mother and British father, by age 3 1/2, Hannah Brock had started playing the drums at her school in Beijing, and by age 4 had started on piano and the guzheng, an ancient instrument that looks to Western eyes something like a zither. By 8 years old she was playing shows and giving short lectures on the instrument. Now, living in the UK, she's part of the Aldeburgh Young Musicians program and studies at Perse Girls School.

The guzheng itself, played by plucking, strumming and string-bending, allows for a huge range of expression in both classical and modern contexts. It's played around the world, but Brock's own master teacher, Ms. Guo, is based in Beijing. So when Brock moved to the UK, she and Ms Guo continued their classes -- over Skype.

Heather Brooke campaigns for freedom of information, requesting one secret document at a time.

Heather Brooke is a freelance journalist, freedom of information campaigner and professor of journalism at City University London. In 2005, she filed one of the very first requests under the UK's Freedom of Information Act, asking to see the expense reports of Members of Parliament. The request was blocked, modified and refiled, and blocked again...but the years-long quest to view expense documents, and the subsequent investigation, led to 2009's parliamentary expenses scandal. The scandal led to the first forced resignation of the Speaker of the House in 300 years.

Brooke worked as a political and crime reporter in the US before moving to Britain, where she writes for the national papers. She has published three books: Your Right to Know, The Silent State, and 2011'sThe Revolution Will Be Digitised. It was while researching her latest book that she obtained a leak from Wikileaks of the full batch of 251,287 US diplomatic cables and worked with The Guardian newspaper on an investigation.

Fifteen years ago, Sarah Caddick left the research lab to focus on “bigger-picture” things: science planning, policy and communication.

Sarah Caddick used to study neuroscience—specifically, the mechanisms responsible for epileptic seizures. But in 1998 she shifted from a person who does science to one who facilitates it.

Today, Caddick is the Neuroscience Advisor to David Sainsbury, a British businessman, philanthropist and politician, and serves as a senior advisor at his Gatsby Charitable Foundation. Gatsby is a key funder of scientific research in several areas, including neuroscience, and together with the Wellcome Trust is building a new research center in London to help explore the neural circuitry responsible for the behavior of human beings.

For TEDGlobal she has curated, and will guest-host, the session “Misbehaving Beautifully.”

Paolo Cardini is a product designer who asks serious questions about how we live -- and answers them with whimsical and playful designs.

Paolo Cardini likes asking some important questions about the way we live, like: Does multitasking actually help us become more efficient? How far will social networking go? Who are the players in the myriad conflicts in the Arab world? What is the next frontier in product development? -- and trying to answer them with playful designs, like his I Like Sit chaise lounge, which updates your Facebook status depending on your position, and MiddleField, a foosball table depicting different players in the Middle East. For TEDGlobal 2012 Cardini created a unique product called the MONOtask project. To help you deal with your overly multitasked life, Cardini has designed 3D-printed smartphone covers that "downgrade" your phone to be much dumber. Download your own cover plans and start monotasking >>

Cardini is currently an MFA Design Assistant Professor at Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar.

TED University: Session 1Mon Jun 25, 20124:15 – 5:45

Candy ChangArtist, designer, urban planner

Candy Chang creates art that prompts people to think about their secrets, wishes and hopes -- and then share them. She is a TED Senior Fellow.

Candy Chang is an artist, designer, and urban planner who explores making cities more comfortable and contemplative places. She believes in the potential of introspection and collective wisdom in public space to improve our communities and help us lead better lives.

Recent projects include Before I Die, where she transformed an abandoned house in her neighborhood in New Orleans into an interactive wall for people to share their hopes and dreams -- a project The Atlantic called “one of the most creative community projects ever.” Other projects include I Wish This Was, a street art project that invites people to voice what they want in vacant storefronts, and Neighborland, an online tool that helps people self-organize and shape the development of their communities. She is a TED Senior Fellow, an Urban Innovation Fellow, and was named a “Live Your Best Life” Local Hero by Oprah magazine. By combining street art with urban planning and social activism, she has been recognized as a leader in developing new strategies for the design of our cities. She is co-founder of Civic Center, an art and design studio in New Orleans. See more at candychang.com.

In her reporting and writing, Leslie T. Chang explores the lives of workers in China, focusing on the experience of women.

Leslie T. Chang's book Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China traces the lives of Chunming and Min, two young women working in Dongguan, a factory city in South China. Leaving their home villages far behind in pursuit of work, Chunming and Min are part of an estimated 10 million young migrants (estimated to be 70 percent women) who work in China's booming factories. These migrants live in a "perpetual present," forging individual and nontraditional lives amid the breakneck pace of manufacturing.

As Chang gets to know these two women and others, she reveals the harsh realities of China's spectacular industrial growth, and also explores her family's own history of migration from mainland China.

Chang lived in China for a decade as a correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. She is now based in Egypt.

With Zipcar, Robin Chase introduced car-crazy America to the concept of non-ownership. Now she's flipping that model with Buzzcar, which lets you rent your own auto to your neighbors.

If she weren't a proven entrepreneur, you might imagine Robin Chase as a transportation geek, a dedicated civil servant, endlessly refining computer models of freeway traffic. If she weren't such a green-conscious problem-solver, you might take her for a startup whiz. Case in point: In 2000, Chase focused her MIT business training on a car-sharing scheme imported from Europe and co-founded Zipcar, now the largest car-sharing business in the world. Using a wireless key, location awareness and Internet billing, members pick up Zipcars at myriad locations anytime they want one.

Now Chase has launched Buzzcar, a car-sharing service in France with a twist: instead of a fleet of green Zipcars, the service lets users share their own cars and make money off their unused capacity. Call it peer-to-peer auto rental.

Keith Chen's new research suggests that the language you speak may impact the way you think about your future.

Does the future look like a different world to you, or more like an extension of the present? In an intriguing piece of research, Keith Chen suggests that your attitude about the future has a strong relationship to the language you speak. In a nutshell, some languages refer to the future using verb helpers like "will" and "shall," while others don't have specific verbs to refer to future actions. Chen correlated these two different language types with remarkably different rates of saving for the future (guess who saves more?). He calls this connection the "futurity" of languages. The paper is in the process of being published by the American Economic Review, and it's already generated discussion. Chen says: "While the data I analyze don’t allow me to completely understand what role language plays in these relationships, they suggest that there is something really remarkable to be explained about the interaction of language and economic decision-making. These correlations are so strong and survive such an aggressive set of controls, that the chances they arise by random lies somewhere between one in 10,000 and one in 10^32."

Chen excels in asking unusual questions to yield original results. Another recent work (with Yale colleague and TEDGlobal 2009 speaker Laurie Santos) examined how monkeys view economic risk--with surprisingly humanlike irrationality. While a current working paper asks a surprising, if rhetorical, question: Does it make economic sense for a woman to become a physician?

What are the ethics of online communities? What are the legalities of digital political activism? Gabriella "Biella" Coleman draws from her training as an anthropologist to answer such questions about Internet cultures.

Starting in 2009, Coleman focused her talents on Anonymous, an amorphous community born in 2003 on the online image board 4chan. Anonymous started out online, where it remains very active through various campaigns, but in recent years it has also stepped out in the “real” world, playing pranks on The Church of Scientology and participating in Occupy Wall Street. Coleman’s ongoing chronicles of Anonymous reveal the groups’ fascinating evolution.

A professor of chemistry, nanoscience and chemical complexity, Lee Cronin and his research group investigate how chemistry can revolutionize modern technology and even create life.

Lee Cronin's lab at the University of Glasgow does cutting-edge research into how complex chemical systems, created from non-biological building blocks, can have real-world applications with wide impact. At TEDGlobal 2012, Cronin shared some of the lab's latest work: creating a 3D printer for molecules. This device -- which has been prototyped -- can download plans for molecules and print them, in the same way that a 3D printer creates objects. In the future, Cronin says this technology could potentially be used to print medicine -- cheaply and wherever it is needed. As Cronin says: "What Apple did for music, I'd like to do for the discovery and distribution of prescription drugs."

At TEDGlobal 2011, Cronin shared his lab's bold plan to create life. At the moment, bacteria is the minimum unit of life -- the smallest chemical unit that can undergo evolution. But in Cronin's emerging field, he's thinking about forms of life that won't be biological. To explore this, and to try to understand how life itself originated from chemicals, Cronin and others are attempting to create truly artificial life from completely non-biological chemistries that mimic the behavior of natural cells. They call these chemical cells, or Chells.

Cronin's research interests also encompass self-assembly and self-growing structures -- the better to assemble life at nanoscale. At the University of Glasgow, this work on crystal structures is producing a raft of papers from his research group. He says: "Basically one of my longstanding research goals is to understand how life emerged on planet Earth and re-create the process."

Amy Cuddy’s research on body language reveals that we can change other people’s perceptions — and even our own body chemistry — simply by changing body positions.

Amy Cuddy wasn’t supposed to become a successful scientist. In fact, she wasn’t even supposed to finish her undergraduate degree. Early in her college career, Cuddy suffered a severe head injury in a car accident, and doctors said she would struggle to fully regain her mental capacity and finish her undergraduate degree.

But she proved them wrong. Today, Cuddy is a professor and researcher at Harvard Business School, where she studies how nonverbal behavior and snap judgments affect people from the classroom to the boardroom. And her training as a classical dancer (another skill she regained after her injury) is evident in her fascinating work on "power posing" -- how your body position influences others and even your own brain.

Raghu Dixit plays a unique, rousing blend of Indian and Western influences.

With soulful vocals sung in his own language of Kannada, Raghu Dixit plays what he calls “Indian folk-rock, with world rhythms creeping in.” His mix of pop and regional Indian sounds, backed by his acoustic guitar and his band, the Raghu Dixit Project, has captivated a global audience and made him a star in his home province of Karnataka.

Dixit himself was trained as a microbiologist, and was a pharmaceutical researcher when he heard the call to play music for his living. Now he fills stadiums in India, writes music for dance and film, and plays festivals around the world (including multiple performances at Glastonbury last summer).

ONE (whose co-founders include rock star Bono) advocates for aid, trade, debt cancellation, investment and governance reform to help the citizens of emerging countries drive and determine their own destiny. Right now, the group's focus is the UN's Millennium Development Goals, eight benchmarks for health, justice and well-being announced in 2000 and targeted to be achieved in 2015. ONE is working to accelerate attention on the MDGs in the last four years of the challenge.

Kirby Ferguson explores creativity in a world where "everything is a remix."

What's a remix? In Kirby Ferguson's view, any piece of art that contains a recognizable reference to another work--a quote from a lyric, a borrowed riff, a filmic homage. Which makes almost everything a remix, from a Led Zeppelin song to a classic film from George Lucas. His deeply researched and insanely fun four-part web series, "Everything Is a Remix," dives into the question: Is remixing a form of creativity, a production of the new on the shoulders of what precedes it, or is it just copying? He comes out firmly on the side of creativity, calling for protections for people who, with good intentions, weave together bits of existing culture into something fresh and relevant.

Our world is not flat, says ecnomist Pankaj Ghemawat -- it's at best semi-globalized, with limited interactions between countries and economies.

There seem to be two leading views of globalization: either that it is done and the world is flat (a view popularized by Tom Friedman) or that it has led to a world dominated by corporations (Naomi Klein). Pankaj Ghemawat disagrees with both -- and his case, backed by data, can be convincing. His most recent book, World 3.0, based on extensive research and backed up with abundant data, explores the true face of globalization--and shows that the world is not one vast market, but many small, interconnected, discrete entities, with varying degrees of openness to one another. That even the most open economies are still relatively closed. That we live in a world of semi-globalization at best. Ghemawat also refutes the assumption that globalization leads to homogeneization. According to The Economist, World 3.0 “should be read by anyone who wants to understand the most important economic development of our time.”

Ghemawat is a professor of strategic management at IESE Business School in Spain. In his latest work, he explores another kind of networked economy--the cross-border "geography" of Facebook and Twitter followers.

Marc Goodman works to prevent future crimes and acts of terrorism, even those security threats not yet invented.

Marc Goodman imagines the future crime and terrorism challenges we will all face as a result of advancing technologies. He thinks deeply about the disruptive security implications of robotics, artificial intelligence, social data, virtual reality and synthetic biology. Technology, he says, is affording exponentially growing power to non-state actors and rogue players, with significant consequences for our common global security. How to respond to these threats? The crime-fighting solution might just lie in crowdsourcing.

Goodman heads the Future Crimes Institute, a think tank and clearinghouse that researches and advises on the security and risk implications of emerging technologies. He also serves as the Global Security Advisor and Chair for Policy and Law at Singularity University.

Antony Gormley's work places human forms into eye-opening new contexts, asking us to reconsider our own place in the world. In his 2007/2010 piece "Event Horizon," he placed several dozen life-size casts of his own body on urban rooftops, where they looked out over streets and squares. Does the viewer imagine herself watched by these looming figures--or imagine being one of them? More recently, his cast iron figures have been disseminated over 150 square km in the mountain pastures of the Austrian Alps, all standing at exactly 2039 meters of altitude. "They are a mediation between the domestication of the valleys and the idea of the peak,” Gormley said of the project, codenamed "Horizon Field." Or take his work "One & Other," in which he curated members of the public to stand on an elevated plinth over Trafalgar Square in London for one hour at a time, creating a constantly changing celebration of humanity.

This spring, he collaborated with the choreographer Hofesh Shechter to create the powerful "Survivor," a piece with hundreds of dancers moving their own forms through space and time.

Macy Gray's new album of covers are the "songs that I would’ve probably written in another life.”

You might know Macy Gray from her massive single “I Try”--but there's so much more to know. A gifted songwriter and idiosyncratically wonderful singer, Gray has been overturning expectation since her 2000 debut CD,On How Life Is, which became a global hit.

For her new release, Covered, Gray worked with producer Hal Wilner to re-imagine, and find new dark passages in, beloved indie-rock love songs from Eurythmics, Metallica, the Arcade Fire, and more. As she crawls inside the lyrics to "Creep" by Radiohead, you can hear her exploring both the swing and the pain of this classic confessional, reworking it and other songs on the record to reflect her worldview as an artist, a mom, an actor, a fan of big ideas (she hung out with Bill Gates at TED2011) and a creative force.

Michael Hansmeyer is an architect and programmer who explores the use of algorithms and computation to generate architectural form.

Classical architecture is defined by "orders" -- ways to connect a column to a building, to articulate the joining of materials and structural forces. Colloquially, these orders are based on elemental forms: the tree trunk, the plank, the scroll, the leaf. Michael Hansmeyer is adding a new elemental form: the subdivision algorithm. He turns his math and programming skills to making ornate, organic, hyperdetailed columns generated from lines of code and then comped up in cross-sections of cardboard, almost as if they're being 3D printed.

His recent work with cupolas and domes is even more mesmerizing, like looking deep inside an organic form of near-unbearable complexity. See images at digital-grotesque.com >>

Neil Harbisson's "eyeborg" allows him to hear colors, even those beyond the range of sight.

Born with the inability to see color, Neil Harbisson wears a prosthetic device — he calls it an "eyeborg" — that allows him to hear the spectrum, even those colors beyond the range of human sight. His unique experience of color informs his artwork — which, until he met cyberneticist Adam Montandon at a college lecture, was strictly black-and-white. By working with Montandon, and later with Peter Kese, Harbisson helped design a lightweight eyepiece that he wears on his forehead that transposes the light frequencies of color hues into sound frequencies.

Harbisson's artwork blurs the boundaries between sight and sound. In his Sound Portraits series, he listens to the colors of faces to create a microtonal chord. In the City Colours project, he expresses the capital cities of Europe in two colors (Monaco is azure and salmon pink; Bratislava yellow and turquoise).

A relentless experimenter, Heap's latest song cycle is built around some 900 fan-submitted "sound seeds," or samples of everyday sounds. The first six of these "Heapsongs" have been released via her website, and include the lovely "Propeller Seeds," inspired by a chance meeting at a past TEDGlobal. During 2012's TEDGlobal she recorded a song in various locations around Edinburgh, "anywhere that has a piano and they let me turn up with a microphone." She has also composed the orchestral score for the crowdsourced nature film "Love the Earth."

Heap's last album Ellipse earned her a Grammy and Ivor Novello award. This summer marks the release of Sparks, her fifth and most ambitious album to date. Sparks' songs have taken Imogen all over the world from her North East London home studio to the Himalayas via China. This year Imogen is the guest artist-curator for the iconic London Roundhouse venue’s new music festival, Reverb. The eagerly awaited Sparks world tour will begin at Reverb in August 2014. Meanwhile, Imogen will be celebrating her tenth TED anniversary this year.

The former CEO of five businesses, Margaret Heffernan explores the all-too-human thought patterns -- like conflict avoidance and selective blindness -- that lead organizations and managers astray.

How do organizations think? In her book Willful Blindness, Margaret Heffernan examines why businesses and the people who run them often ignore the obvious -- with consequences as dire as the global financial crisis and Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster.

Heffernan began her career in television production, building a track record at the BBC before going on to run the film and television producer trade association IPPA. In the US, Heffernan became a serial entrepreneur and CEO in the wild early days of web business. She now blogs for the Huffington Post and BNET.com. Her latest book, Beyond Measure, a TED Books original, explores the small steps companies can make that lead to big changes in their culture.

Kathy Hinde is a musician and inventor whose latest musical instrument is played by birds.

Imagine the soundboard inside an old upright piano as a blank canvas for sound--strung with wires from post to post, but with no means of plucking them. Kathy Hinde's "Piano Migrations" transforms that soundboard into a kinetic sound sculpture. Videos of birds on electricity lines are projected directly onto the piano to provide an everchanging musical score: the birds’ movements trigger small machines to twitch and flutter on the piano strings. In this work, nature controls machines to create delicate music.

Ellen Jorgensen is at the leading edge of the do-it-yourself biotechnology movement, which brings scientific exploration and understanding to the masses.

After many years of working as a molecular biologist in the biotechnology industry, Ellen Jorgensen needed a change. So, in 2009, bolstered by her belief in public science literacy, education, and outreach, together with TED Fellow Oliver Medvedik, she founded Genspace, the world’s first government-compliant DIY biotech lab.

Despite criticism that some research should be left to the experts, the Brooklyn-based lab continues to thrive. Amateur and professional scientists conduct award-winning research there on projects as diverse as identifying microbes that live in Earth’s atmosphere and (Jorgensen's own pet project) DNA-barcoding plants from Alaska, to distinguish between species that look alike but may not be closely related evolutionarily.

And in a new short book for TED, Hybrid Reality, Parag and Ayesh Khanna explore our complex relationship with science and technology--and how it could create new and unexpected lifestyles and social structures. He's a director of the Hybrid Reality Institute, where he helps explore human-technology co-evolution.

For TEDGlobal he has curated and will guest-host the session “The Upside of Transparency”.

With Coursera, Daphne Koller and co-founder Andrew Ng are bringing courses from top colleges online, free, for anyone who wants to take them.

A 3rd generation Ph.D who is passionate about education, Stanford professor Daphne Koller is excited to be making the college experience available to anyone through her startup, Coursera. With classes from 85 top colleges, Coursera is an innovative model for online learning. While top schools have been putting lectures online for years, Coursera's platform supports the other vital aspect of the classroom: tests and assignments that reinforce learning.

At the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, computer scientist Daphne Koller studies how to model large, complicated decisions with lots of uncertainty. (Her research group is called DAGS, which stands for Daphne's Approximate Group of Students.) In 2004, she won a MacArthur Fellowship for her work, which involves, among other things, using Bayesian networks and other techniques to explore biomedical and genetic data sets.

From his home base in Bulgaria, Ivan Krastev thinks about democracy -- and how to reframe it.

Political scientist Ivan Krastev is watching the Euro crisis closely, fascinated by what it reveals about Europe's place in history: What does it mean for the democratic model? Will a fragmented Europe return to nationalist identity politics?

In his latest work, Krastev places recent events on a continuum of five revolutions over the past decades:

+ The socio-cultural revolution of the 1960s. + Market revolutions of the 1980s. + Central Europe in 1989 (which brought socio-cultural and market revolutions together). + The communications revolution. + And finally the revolution in neurosciences, which lays bare the irrationality and emotional manipulation in popular politics.

As a result of these five great changes, we've become extremely open and connected, while on the flipside cementing a mistrust of elites. Can democracy flourish when a mistrust of elites is a permanent feature?

With his team in Tunisia, Hassine Labaied has developed a breakthrough technology for capturing the energy of the wind.

Leaving a career in banking, Labaied co-founded and is CEO of Saphon, a cleantech startup with a new design for capturing wind energy that contradicts the dominant technology of the three-bladed turbine. Instead of spinning a rotor like in a windmill, in the Saphon prototypes the wind is harnessed by a sail-like structure that creates a back-and-forth motion. The motion is converted into mechanical energy, then to hydraulic energy, which can be transformed into electricity or stored.

Did we really see what we thought we saw? Rob Legato creates visual illusions for movies -- thinking deeply both about vfx's expanding tech power and the truly new creative processes that can result. Legato won his first Oscar in 1998 for his work on James Cameron's Titanic, after several years in television supervising effects on two Star Trek series. His 2012 Oscar win for Hugo, the 3D film about a boy who lives alone in a Paris train station, underscores his fascinating partnership with Martin Scorsese -- doing digital effects on documentaries and new classics like The Departed.

He's worked with the big effects houses like Sony Imageworks and Digital Domain, but is now fascinated with the nimble new workflows made possible with digital tools. He designed the "virtual cinematography pipeline" that let James Cameron shoot Avatar like a feature film, not a software project. We know that fx can create new worlds -- but how can these tools unlock new creativity?

Max Little is a mathematician whose research includes a breakthrough technique to monitor – and potentially screen for – Parkinson's disease through simple voice recordings.

Max Little is an applied mathematician whose goal is to "see connections between subjects, not boundaries … to see how things are related, not how they are different." He has a background in applied mathematics, statistics, signal processing and computational engineering, and his work has been applied across disciplines like biomedicine, extreme rainfall analysis and forecasting, biophysical signal processing, and hydrogeomorphology and open channel flow measurement. Little is best known for his work on the Parkinson's Voice Initiative, in which he and his team developed a cheap and simple tool that uses precise voice analysis software to detect Parkinson's with 99 percent accuracy. Little is a TEDGlobal 2012 Fellow and a Wellcome Trust-MIT Postdoctoral Research Fellow.

TED Fellows Talks: Session 1Mon Jun 25, 201210:30 – 12:00

Beau LottoNeuroscientist, Artist

Beau Lotto is founder of Lottolab, a hybrid art studio and science lab. With glowing, interactive sculpture -- and old-fashioned peer-reviewed research--he's illuminating the mysteries of the brain's visual system.

"Let there be perception," was evolution's proclamation, and so it was that all creatures, from honeybees to humans, came to see the world not as it is, but as was most useful. This uncomfortable place--where what an organism's brain sees diverges from what is actually out there--is what Beau Lotto and his team at Lottolab are exploring through their dazzling art-sci experiments and public illusions. Their Bee Matrix installation, for example, places a live bee in a transparent enclosure where gallerygoers may watch it seek nectar in a virtual meadow of luminous Plexiglas flowers. (Bees, Lotto will tell you, see colors much like we humans do.) The data captured isn't just discarded, either: it's put to good use in probing scientific papers, and sometimes in more exhibits.

At their home in London’s Science Museum, the lab holds "synesthetic workshops" where kids and adults make abstract paintings that computers interpret into music, and they host regular Lates--evenings of science, music and "mass experiments." Lotto is passionate about involving people from all walks of life in research on perception--both as subjects and as fellow researchers. One such program, called "i,scientist," in fact led to the publication of the first ever peer-reviewed scientific paper written by schoolchildren ("Blackawton Bees," December 2010). It starts, "Once upon a time ..."

These and Lotto's other conjurings are slowly, charmingly bending the science of perception--and our perceptions of what science can be.

John Maeda, the former president of the Rhode Island School of Design, is dedicated to linking design and technology. Through the software tools, web pages and books he creates, he spreads his philosophy of elegant simplicity.

When John Maeda became president of the legendary Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 2008, he told the Wall Street Journal, "Everyone asks me, 'Are you bringing technology to RISD?' I tell them, no, I'm bringing RISD to technology."

In his fascinating career as a programmer and an artist, he's always been committed to blurring the lines between the two disciplines. As a student at MIT, studying computer programming, the legendary Muriel Cooper persuaded him to follow his parallel passion for fine art and design. And when computer-aided design began to explode in the mid-1990s, Maeda was in a perfect position at the MIT Media Lab to influence and shape the form, helping typographers and page designers explore the freedom of the web.

Maeda is leading the "STEAM" movement--adding an "A" for Art to the education acronym STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math)--and experiencing firsthand the transformation brought by social media. After leaving his post as RISD's president, Maeda is turning his attention to Silicon Valley, where is is working as a Design Partner for Kleiner, Perkins, Caulfield and Byers. He is also consulting for eBay, where he is the chair of the Design Advisory Board.

After the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, Becci Manson and her volunteer colleagues cleaned and restored hundreds of damaged photos.

Becci Manson flew to Tōhoku, Japan after the 2011 disaster, determined to help with cleanup and rebuilding.

As she writes: "During those 3 weeks of digging ditches and gutting homes I discovered vast amounts of photos that had been found and handed into evacuation centers. The photos were dirty, wet and homeless. As I spent my first day hand-cleaning them, I couldnt help but think how easy it would be for me, my colleagues and my friends to fix some of them. So we did."

She spent the next 6 months organizing a worldwide network of volunteer retouchers, restoring these photos and training local All Hands volunteer teams to hand-clean the photos handed in to local authorities. These teams have restored hundreds and hand-cleaned well over 100,000 photos.

Since the project in Tōhoku, Manson and her team has begun similar cleaning and retouching projects in Prattsville, NY after Hurricane Irene, and in Binghamton, NY after Tropical Storm Lee.

Melissa Marshall aims to teach great communication skills to scientists and engineers, so that they can effectively share their work.

Melissa Marshall is a crusader against bullet points and an evangelist for effective slide design in scientific presentations. She believes that the future depends on the innovations of scientists and engineers, and is passionate about helping them effectively tell the story of their work.

A faculty member with the Department of Communication Arts & Sciences at Penn State University, Melissa specializes in teaching speaking skills to engineering students and has also lectured at Harvard Medical School, the New York Academy of Sciences, Cornell University and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Melissa is the co-founder and advisor for the Penn State Engineering Ambassadors, an award-winning science and engineering outreach communication program. She is also an organizer and the faculty advisor for TEDxPSU, a student-run TEDx event held at Penn State each year.

TED University: Session 1Mon Jun 25, 20124:15 – 5:45

Jason McCueLawyer

Jason McCue litigates against terrorists, dictators and others who seem above the law, using the legal and judicial system in innovative ways.

Jason McCue uses the legal system of the UK (and increasingly the world) to fight for human rights. In 2009, he won a landmark civil case at the high court in Belfast that resulted in a settlement for victims of the 1998 Omagh bombing by the Real IRA -- after attempts to prosecute the group in criminal courts had failed. It was a bold legal strategy now being copied for other victims, such as those of Libyan-supported terrorism and of the attacks in London and Mumbai. In September 2011 he and his firm launched another strategy for prosecuting Alexander Lukashenko, the dictator of Belarus, on counts of torture and hostage-taking: creating a "prosecution kit" to be sent to courts around the world. Wherever Lukashenko travels, he now faces the prospect of prosecution.

McCue is also a partner, with his wife, TV star Mariella Frostrup, of the GREAT Initiative: the Gender Rights and Equality Action Trust.

Reality is broken, says Jane McGonigal, and we need to make it work more like a game. Her work shows us how.

Jane McGonigal asks: Why doesn't the real world work more like an online game? In the best-designed games, our human experience is optimized: We have important work to do, we're surrounded by potential collaborators, and we learn quickly and in a low-risk environment. In her work as a game designer, she creates games that use mobile and digital technologies to turn everyday spaces into playing fields, and everyday people into teammates. Her game-world insights can explain--and improve--the way we learn, work, solve problems, and lead our real lives. She served as the director of game R&D at the Institute for the Future, and she is the founder of Gameful, which she describes as "a secret headquarters for worldchanging game developers."

Several years ago she suffered a serious concussion, and she created a multiplayer game to get through it, opening it up to anyone to play. In “Superbetter,” players set a goal (health or wellness) and invite others to play with them--and to keep them on track. While most games, and most videogames, have traditionally been about winning, we are now seeing increasing collaboration and games played together to solve problems.

Wayne McGregor and his dancers explore the uncharted territory where mind and movement intersect.

Wayne McGregor is a man in perpetual motion. When not incubating new approaches to choreography with his company, Random Dance, he creates works for ballet, theatre and opera companies worldwide--including the Royal Ballet in London, where he's choreographer in residence, and contemporary dance powerhouse Sadler's Wells. In ongoing collaborations with psychologists, neuroscientists and cognitive scientists, Random dancers are helping researchers measure and analyze how the brain works in the creative process. Whatʼs emerged so far is that we can, and do, think with our bodies.

McGregor is no stranger to pop culture: he's designed movement for Thom Yorke of Radiohead and for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. This spring he collaborated with DJ Mark Ronson on Carbon Life, a piece for the Royal Ballet with vocals from Boy George. And he's creating a new dance piece for thousands of dancers in Londonʼs Trafalgar Square on Saturday, July 14.

Robyn Meredith reports on the Asia-Pacific region for Bloomberg TV and writes brilliantly about China's changing place in the world.

Robyn Meredith is a correspondent for Bloomberg Television in Hong Kong, covering business and financial news across the Asia-Pacific region. She's the author of “The Elephant and the Dragon," a remarkable analysis of the rise of India and China over the past decades.

Her insights into China stem from extensive travel across Asia and a decade's reporting on the booming Asian markets. But her view spans across the vast landscape of globalization--as it reshapes business, military strategy, technology and the global labor market.

She has previously written for the New York Times and for Forbes magazine.

Ryan Merkley is the Chief Operating Officer at the Mozilla Foundation, and is dedicated to making the web a more user-friendly place.

A native of Toronto, Canada, Ryan Merkley is the Chief Operating Officer at the Mozilla Foundation. He has devoted his career to "helping users of the web become makers of the web." Merkley advocates for open data initiatives, especially in regards to the public sector.

Augmented reality is the process of adding layers of information onto the world we see, viewable only through technology. In this space, the Aurasma Lite app uses a smartphone and camera to lay "auras"--3D images, games, animations--onto real-world places. Point your phone at a movie poster on the street and launch a trailer; point at a building to pull up an interactive map... or create your own "aura" and upload it to the virtual space for anyone to see. Matt Mills and Tamara Roukaerts both joined Aurasma when it launched in June 2011.

They say: "This is the next step on from simply browsing the internet because now the digital content we discover, create and share can be woven seamlessly in to the world around us."

What does "normal behavior" look like? To find out, Read Montague is imaging thousands of brains at work.

Until recently, the world's curiosity about our brains seemed to focus on abnormal behavior. Which of course left a big question unanswered: Do we even know what "normal behavior" is? Through the landmark Roanoke Brain Study, Read Montague is hoping to find that out, exploring the everyday tasks of brains -- making decisions, understanding social context, and relating to others -- by neuroimaging some 5,000 people, ages 18-85, over a period of many years.

Montague's teams in Virginia and in London lead fascinating research in computational neuroscience (how the brain's "machinery" works), offering insight into the relationship between the social and cognitive functions. For instance, a recent study from his group found that in small social groups, some people will alter the expression of their IQ in reaction to social pressures -- revising, in almost all cases, downward.

A TEDGlobal Fellow, Catarina Mota plays with "smart materials" -- like shape-memory alloys and piezoelectric structures that react to voltage -- and encourages others to do so too.

A maker of things and open-source advocate, Catarina Mota is co-founder of openMaterials.org, a collaborative project dedicated to do-it-yourself experimentation with smart materials. This is a new class of materials that change in response to stimuli: conductive ink, shape-memory plastics, etc. Her goal is to encourage the making of things; to that end, she teaches hands-on workshops on high-tech materials and simple circuitry for both young people and adults--with a side benefit of encouraging interest in science, technology and knowledge-sharing. She's working on her PhD researching the social impact of open and collaborative practices for the development of technologies. In other words: Do we make better stuff when we work together? She is also a co-founder of Lisbon's hackerspace altLab.

Daria Musk created a new global music venue by turning Google+ video Hangouts into live interactive concerts.

A young singer and songwriter with big dreams, an entrepreneurial streak and a global-sized heart, Daria Musk is pushing the boundaries in music and social media. In the summer of 2011, a weekend of lugging her guitar amps through the rain and an invitation to join Google+ sparked the idea to perform a live concert via the social network's video chat feature, Hangouts. In just a few months she turned from a local unknown to a global star, with more than 1.3 million fans ("G+niuses", she calls them) all around the world.

Her breakthrough concerts last up to 8 hours, with audiences of hundreds of thousands watching and interacting online, live. She’s now taking her online connection to the live stage–creating interactive global concerts everywhere she goes.

To research his new book, "Stealth of Nations," Robert Neuwirth spent four years among street vendors, smugglers and “informal” import/export firms.

In his 2012 book Stealth of Nations, Robert Neuwirth challenges conventional thinking by examining the world's informal economy close up. To do so, he spent four years living and working with street vendors and gray marketers, to capture its scope, its vigor--and its lessons. He calls it “System D” and argues that it is not a hidden economy, but a very visible, growing, effective one, fostering entrepreneurship and representing 1.8 billion jobs worldwide.

Before this, for his previous book Shadow Cities(also a TEDTalk), he spent two years exploring one of the most profound trends of our time: the mass migration of the world's population into urban shantytowns. A billion people live as squatters. Life in a favela, slum, shantytown is hard: no water, no transport, no sewage. But in the squatter cities of Rio, Nairobi, Istanbul and Mumbai, Neuwirth discovered restaurants, markets, clinics and effective forms of self-organization.

Our challenge, Neuwirth says, isn't to end squatter cities or shut down gray markets--but to engage and empower those who live and work in them.

A lawyer by training and a techie by inclination, Beth Noveck works to build data transparency into government.

How can our data strengthen our democracies? In her work, Beth Noveck explores what "opengov" really means--not just freeing data from databases, but creating meaningful ways for citizens to collaborate with their governments.

As the US's first Deputy CTO, Beth Noveck founded the White House Open Government Initiative, which developed administration policy on transparency, participation, and collaboration. Among other projects, she designed and built Peer-to-Patent, the U.S. government’s first expert network. She's now working on the design for ORGPedia, a platform for mashing up and visualizing public and crowdsourced data about corporations. Her book The Networked State will appear in 2013.

Amy O'Toole is a 12-year-old student who helped run a science experiment inspired by Beau Lotto's participative science approach. At age 10 she became one of the youngest people ever to publish a peer-reviewed science paper.

Amy O'Toole is a 12-year-old student with a peer-reviewed scientific publication under her belt. She took part in a participative science program led by Beau Lotto , called "i, scientist," which inspired a science experiment by a group of 26 primary school students in Blackawton, Devon, UK. O'Toole was never interested in science before this project, but now intends to study the human mind and body. The project led to the publication of the first ever peer-reviewed scientific paper written by schoolchildren ("Blackawton Bees,"Royal Society's Biology Letters, December 2010). It starts: "Once upon a time ... ."

Our environment changes faster than we can learn about it, Eddie Obeng says. How do we keep up?

What will business look like in 5 years? (Er, what does it look like now?) Eddie Obeng helps executives keep up with a business and social environment that's changing faster than we can know. Through Pentacle, his online business school, Obeng teaches a theory of management that focuses on adaptation to change. Called "New World Management," it's all about forming and re-forming workgroups, constantly re-evaluating metrics, and being open to all kinds of learning, from hands-on group exercises to a virtual lecture hall/meeting room called the QUBE.

With her consistently striking and dynamic performances, 25-year-old pianist Natasha Paremski reveals the interpretive abilities of a virtuoso.

An electrifying and fearless pianist, Natasha Paremski was born in Moscow and started her piano studies at age 4 there. A few years later her family emigrated to the United States, but the Russian influence has remained strong. She decided early on to step away from competitions, which are the most common start for career pianists.

Her growing repertoire, carried by voracious artistic instincts, reflects a musical maturity beyond her age. In the 2010-11 season, she played the world premiere of a sonata written for her by Gabriel Kahane, which has been included on her first solo album. She has also collaborated with Sting, Trudy Styler and others on Twin Spirits, the story of Robert and Clara Schumann staged at the Royal Opera House in London in 2007.

In towns and villages that have few clinics, doctors and nurses, one particular need often gets overlooked: mental health. When there is no psychiatrist, how do people get care when they need it? Vikram Patel studies how to treat conditions like depression and schizophrenia in low-resource communities, and he's come up with a powerful model: training the community to help.

Based in Goa for much of the year, Patel is part of a policy group that's developing India's first national mental health policy; he's the co-founder of Sangath, a local NGO dedicated to mental health and family wellbeing. In London, he co-directs the Centre for Global Mental Health at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. And he led the efforts to set up the Movement for Global Mental Health, a network that supports mental health care as a basic human right.

From Sangath's mission statement: "At the heart of our vision lies the ‘treatment gap’ for mental disorders; the gap between the number of people with a mental disorder and the number who receive care for their mental disorders."

Sanjay Pradhan is vice president of the World Bank Institute, helping leaders in developing countries learn skills for reform, development and good governance.

The World Bank Institute is the part of the World Bank that focuses on "capacity" -- the piece of polite jargon that masks a big question: How do countries learn? And in a state with a history of corruption, failure and debt, how can leaders -- both public and private-sector -- gain the ability to grow, build, govern? The WBI teaches those skills, focusing on the key force behind real change: building teams and coalitions.

Sanjay Pradhan joined the WBI in 2008, and has worked since then to refine its strategy into three interconnected plans: Open Knowledge, Collaborative Governance, and Innovative Solutions. He is an advocate of transparency and openness as development tools.

Manu Prakash is on a mission to bring radical new technology to global health.

An assistant professor of bioengineering at Stanford University, Manu Prakash is a physicist working at the molecular scale to try and understand no less than how the world really works. As he told BusinessWeek in 2010, he is humbled and inspired by nature’s own solutions to the world's biggest problems. "I build and design tools to uncover how and why biological systems so often outsmart us. I believe one day we will be able to understand the physical design principles of life on Earth, leading to a new way to look at the world we live in."

Born in Meerut, India, Prakash earned a BTech in computer science and engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur before moving to the United States. He did his master’s and PhD in applied physics at MIT before founding the Prakash Lab at Stanford.

Prakash's ultra-low-cost, "print-and-fold" paper microscope won a $100,000 grant from the Gates Foundaton in 2012.

Photography is about creating images by recording light. At the MIT media lab, professor Ramesh Raskar and his team members have invented a camera that can photograph light itself as it moves at, well, the speed of light.

In 1964 MIT professor Harold Edgerton, pioneer of stop-action photography, famously took a photo of a bullet piercing an apple using exposures as short as a few nanoseconds. Inspired by his work, Ramesh Raskar and his team set out to create a camera that could capture not just a bullet (traveling at 850 meters per second) but light itself (nearly 300 million meters per second).

Stop a moment to take that in: photographing light as it moves. For that, they built a camera and software that can visualize pictures as if they are recorded at 1 trillion frames per second. The same photon-imaging technology can also be used to create a camera that can peer "around" corners , by exploiting specific properties of the photons when they bounce off surfaces and objects.

Among the other projects that Raskar is leading, with the MIT Media Lab's Camera Culture research group, are low-cost eye care devices, a next generation CAT-Scan machine and human-computer interaction systems.

Preston Reed’s hands have an otherworldly coordination. The fingers, nails, thumbs, and palms of both left and right dance, pluck, strum, and slap his guitar, which bursts with a full sound.

Most guitarists the world over play their instruments in essentially the same way: the left hand holds the neck and applies pressure to each string to change notes, while the right hand plays the melody. Not so with Preston Reed.

In the 1980s, Reed began playing his instrument in new ways, sometimes twisting his left hand to pick out a melody while the right hand strummed accompaniment or tapping the guitar’s body like a drum. A new playing style was born, with deep chords, complex percussion, and weightless melodies. And he's inspired new generations of guitarists to further innovate on the genre he pioneered.

Young guitarist Usman Riaz pulls a rich, swirling sound out of the acoustic guitar.

TEDGlobal Fellow Usman Riaz is a young Pakistani musician making a worldwide mark with his astonishing and fun-to-listen-to technique. Influenced by percussive guitarists--who move beyond strumming to striking, treating their fretboard like the soundboard of a piano--Riaz makes a sound that feels larger than the instrument itself, with a compelling pattern of repetition and variation that harkens to mystical music traditions.

In 2011, a viral video for his song "Fire Fly" helped bring his sound from the small-but-thriving Pakistani music community to a global audience. He's now collaborating with other musicians in Pakistan and working on a new album of original music.

Elyn Saks asks bold questions about how society treats people with mental illness.

As a law scholar and writer, Elyn Saks speaks for the rights of mentally ill people. It's a gray area: Too often, society's first impulse is to make decisions on their behalf. But it's a slippery slope from in loco parentis to a denial of basic human rights. Saks has brilliantly argued for more autonomy -- and in many cases for a restoration of basic human dignity.

In 2007, deep into her career, she dropped a bombshell -- her autobiography, The Center Cannot Hold. In it, she reveals the depth of her own schizophrenia, now controlled by drugs and therapy. Clear-eyed and honest about her own condition, the book lent her new ammunition in the quest to protect the rights and dignity of the mentally ill.

The Hon. Alex Salmond, MSP, leads the Scottish National Party and is the First Minister of Scotland.

Salmond and his party support Scottish independence, and after securing an outright majority in Parliament in 2011 he intends to stage a referendum on the issue in the autumn of 2014. He is also a campaigner for sustainable development, renewable energy and climate justice. Trained as an economist, and after a career in the private sector, Salmond was elected to the UK House of Commons in 1987 and became a Member of the Scottish Parliament following its establishment in 1999. He was voted First Minister of Scotland in May 2007.

An advocate of human-computer symbiosis, Shyam Sankar looks for clues in big and disparate data sets.

Shyam Sankar is a Director at Palantir Technologies, a secretive Silicon Valley company where he oversees deployments of the company's core technology, which helps law enforcement teams and corporations analyze giant, unrelated databases for clues to potential ... anything. Palantir technologies has been used to find missing children, to detect banking fraud, and to uncover the Shadow Network, a cyber-spy ring that stooped so low as to hack the Dalai Lama's email.

As part of his work, Sankar thinks deeply about the place where human and machine intelligence meet. While artificial intelligence (AI) is the dominant paradigm, he is an advocate of JCR Licklider's "intelligence augmentation" (IA) approach, where algorithms and brains work together to solve problems.

What makes a great school system? To find out, Andreas Schleicher administers a test to compare student performance around the world.

First, a few acronyms: Andreas Schleicher heads the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) at the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). What it means is: He's designed a test, given to hundreds of thousands of 15-year-olds around the world (the most recent covered almost 70 nations), that offers unprecedented insight into how well national education systems are preparing their students for adult life. As The Atlantic puts it, the PISA test "measured not students’ retention of facts, but their readiness for 'knowledge worker' jobs—their ability to think critically and solve real-world problems."

The results of the PISA test, given every three years, are fed back to governments and schools so they can work on improving their ranking. And the data has inspired Schleicher to become a vocal advocate for the policy changes that, his research suggests, make for great schools.

Shimon Schocken is a computer science professor and dedicated educator.

Shimon Schocken is a former dean at Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) Herzliya, a new Israeli private university which he helped found in 1995. He's also taught at NYU, Harvard and Stanford. Together with Noam Nisan he developed a freely available, open-source, self-paced program for learning applied computer science: The Elements of Computing Systems. Offered in 2005, this led to one of the first successful open online courses. Now, courses based on the approach are offered by traditional universities as well as in crowd-sourced settings, and have been taken freely by thousands of self-learners over the web. Registration, lecture and project schedules are managed by volunteer course coordinators, and student questions are answered by the course alumni community.

His current project focuses on developing instructional materials for early-age math education, which he thinks can be transformed using low-cost tablet computers. He uses his other life passion, mountain biking, to teach adolescent boys in Israelʼs juvenile detention centers valuable life lessons through challenging bike rides in remote locations. He was co-organizer and program chair of TEDxTelAviv 2010.

Gerard Senehi creates "an environment where people can suspend their ideas of what’s possible."

Call him the Experimentalist--Gerard Senehi works an entertaining brand of brain magic that convinces his audience he has extrasensory perception, masters telekinesis, and has maybe an ability to read minds. His work skirts the edge of plausible; he plays on the notion that, perhaps, he doesn't know how he does it either.

After a New York Magazine writer saw Gerard Senehi bend the stem of a wineglass, she asked him, as part of a long profile in 2003, to explain one trick that baffled her. She knew it wasn't possible, and had guessed how it had been done. So she asked him. And, she writes: "He considers, then gives me a level, penetrating stare. “But you know what you’re asking me, right?” he says. 'You’re asking me to say that Santa Claus isn’t real.'"

It’s surprising to hear of a former engineer and medical student who has dedicated his career to the analysis of more than 2,500 works of art. But Maurizio Seracini is not your typical art connoisseur. He uses technologies from both of his worlds, such as multispectral imaging, sonogram and x-ray, to peer through the layers of paintings and reveal their secrets.

Most famous is Seracini’s more-than-30-year quest to find Leonardo Da Vinci’s missing painting The Battle of Anghiari. Seracini suspects the piece is behind another giant fresco painted by Giorgio Vasari in the Sala dei Cinquecento in Florence, Italy. To find it, Seracini must find a way to look beneath Vasari’s masterpiece while keeping it intact.

Global development expert Alanna Shaikh takes on the toughest of health issues—from the ones affecting the globe at large to the ones hurting her own family.

TED Fellow Alanna Shaikh is a global health and development specilist with a vendetta against jargon. On her blog, Blood and Milk, she aims to make global development issues both accessible and understandable. In her TED Book, What's Killing Us, she explains the biggest challenges in global wellness -- from HIV/AIDS to the diminishing effectiveness of antibiotics -- in a way that anyone can understand. Earlier this year, she co-founded AidSource, a social network for aid workers. She is also the co-founder of the group SMART Aid, which educates donors and start-up projects about international aid.

Alanna Shaikh is especially interested in Alzheimer's, as she has watched her father deteriorate from the disease over the past 12 years. But she says the experience has not sent her into denial—she plans to be prepared for the genetically transmitted disease, should it ever arrive.

TED University: Session 1Mon Jun 25, 20124:15 – 5:45

Bahia ShehabArtist and historian

TED Fellow Bahia Shehab sends an important message through her street art in Cairo: “You can crush the flowers, but you can’t delay spring."

A Lebanese-Egyptian artist, designer and art historian, Bahia Shehab studies ancient Arabic script and applies it to modern-day issues. She is the Creative Director with MI7-Cairo, working on projects relevant to cultural heritage. Shehab is also an associate professor at the American University in Cairo, where she has developed a four-year Graphic Design program focusing on the discipline in the Arab world. In addition, Shehab is a TED Fellow and a PhD candidate at Leiden University in Holland.

Shehab notably created a De Beers campaign, which won an International Advertising Association gold award. Her installation A Thousand Times No was displayed at the Haus der Kunst in Munich, Germany, and was published as a book by The Khatt Foundation.

But most recently, Shehab has taken her art to the streets of Cairo, stenciling images in support of her country’s revolution.

TED Fellows Talks: Session 2Mon Jun 25, 20121:30 – 3:00

Clay ShirkySocial Media Theorist

Clay Shirky argues that the history of the modern world could be rendered as the history of ways of arguing, where changes in media change what sort of arguments are possible -- with deep social and political implications.

Clay Shirky's work focuses on the rising usefulness of networks -- using decentralized technologies such as peer-to-peer sharing, wireless, software for social creation, and open-source development. New technologies are enabling new kinds of cooperative structures to flourish as a way of getting things done in business, science, the arts and elsewhere, as an alternative to centralized and institutional structures, which he sees as self-limiting. In his writings and speeches he has argued that "a group is its own worst enemy."

Shirky is an adjunct professor in New York Universityʼs graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program, where he teaches a course named “Social Weather.” Heʼs the author of several books. This spring at the TED headquarters in New York, he gave an impassioned talk against SOPA/PIPA that saw 1 million views in 48 hours.

Jason Silva is creating a wildly viral film series built around big thoughts about the future of humanity and the Earth. Image-packed and dense with information, the videos convey information almost subliminally--and convey Silva's own excitement about these mindblowing, jawdropping, "intergalactic-sized" concepts. Think of them (he says) as shots of philosophical espresso.

Silva grew up fascinated by philosophy and filmmaking, and in six years spent as a host and onscreen personality at Current TV he learned how to tell a short, sharp story around a big idea. But his latest project goes beyond simple communication of ideas to place viewers in an almost transcendent state--maybe the best mindset to hear what's coming next.

For TEDGlobal he has created an exclusive short video about "Radical Openness."

In her latest release, the double album Land & Sea, Sarah Slean plays piano pop-rock against an orchestral panorama.

Sarah Slean is a Canadian pianist and singer with a soaring voice and a head full of poetry. Her latest recording is a double album that gathers influences from her multi-decade career and sorts them onto two complementing discs. She describes Land as "a big, warm, gleeful spasm of unabashed pop/rock" influenced by cabaret and classic four-piece rock bands, while Sea is a collection of nine cinematic, string-heavy orchestral arrangements, moody and atmospheric. The Toronto Star called it “an awe-inspiring panorama of the mature poet and musician.”

Laura Snyder weaves tales of Victorian-era scientists that have been described as “fit for Masterpiece Theater.”

A work of history should be more than a collection of happenings, at least from Laura Snyder’s perspective. The Fulbright Scholar, historian of science and professor of philosophy at St. John's University believes histories should aim not only to tell a story, but also to transport a reader through time.

Snyder’s work presents three-dimensional characters that readers connect with. Her most recent book, The Philosophical Breakfast Club, traces the friendship of four 19th-century scientists who met at Cambridge: Charles Babbage (mathematics and computing), William Whewell (math economics), John Herschel (astronomy and photography) and Richard Jones (economy). Inspired by Francis Bacon's ideas, they coined the word “scientist” and were central in transforming science from the province of the amateur (practitioners were until then called "natural philosophers") to a professional system.

Susan Solomon enables support for human stem cell research, aiming to cure major diseases and empower more personalized medicine.

Susan Solomon’s health care advocacy stems from personal medical trials—namely, her son’s Type 1 diabetes and her mother’s fatal cancer. Following a successful career as a lawyer and business entrepreneur, Solomon, frustrated by the slow pace of medical research, was inspired to use those skills to follow another passion: accelerating medical research with real-world results as a social entrepreneur. And through her own research and conversations with medical experts, she decided that stem cells (cells that have the ability to morph into any other kind of cell) had the greatest potential to impact peoples’ health.

In 2005, Solomon founded the New York Stem Cell Foundation, now one of the largest nonprofit research institutions and laboratories in this field in the world. The NYSCF Research Institute conducts all facets of stem cell research from growing the cells to drug discovery.

At TEDGlobal 2012, Solomon announced the NYSCF Global Stem Cell Array, the new technology to create thousands of stem cell avatars and genetically array them to functionalize the data from the human genome to revolutionize the way we develop cures and treatments so they are better, safer, less expensive and happen much more quickly.

Malte Spitz asked his cell phone carrier what it knew about him--and mapped what he found out.

German Green politician Malte Spitz went to court to obtain the information that his cell phone operator, Deutsche Telekom, gathered (and kept) about his activity. The results astonished him. Over the course of six months, they had tracked his geographical location and what he was doing with his phone more than 35,000 times. Working with the German newspaper Die Zeit, an infographic was created that shows Spitz's activity across an interactive timeline, combined DT's geolocation data with information relating to his life as a politician, such as Twitter feeds, blog entries and website. By pushing the play button, viewers can set off on a detail-rich trip through six months of his life. And more, because he keeps asking the telecom company for his most recent data.

Spitz, a member of the Executive Committee of the German Green Party, is responsible for media and new-media policies, civil liberties and privacy issues.

What will 21st-century security look like? Navy Admiral James Stavridis suggests that dialogue and openness will be the game-changers.

In the world of security, says James Stavridis, "we are generally focused on risk. But I think we should spend a bit of our most precious resource — time — on thinking about and developing opportunities." The first US Navy officer to hold the positions of Commander of the US European Command (USEUCOM) and of NATO's Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), Stavridis has been advocating the opportunities perspective for a long time. He sees dialogue and collaboration — between nations, and between public and private sectors — as key to the future of security. As a Navy officer, he thinks deeply about protecting the value of our "global commons." And he's a rare high-ranking military officer who tweets and blogs.

He has led the recent military effort in Lybia, among other NATO engagements. Previously Stavridis commanded US Southern Command in Miami, focused on Latin America and the Caribbean.

At the Design Museum in London, director Deyan Sudjic champions design as art -- and as an economic and political force.

The Design Museum calls itself the UK’s "cultural champion of design." Aside from mounting exhibits of modern-design history and contemporary design (from architect David Adjaye to shoe genius Christian Louboutin), the museum actively promotes the role of design and innovation in re-imagining the future.

Deyan Sudjic has led the museum since 2006, and is currently spearheading a move from its jewelbox of a space on the Thames, to a larger building on Kensington High Street. Before joining the Design Museum, Sudjic was an educator and a writer for the Observer and the editor of Domus, the international magazine of art, architecture and design. His books include The Endless City, an addictive (and monumental) compendium of urban facts and ideas; and The Language of Things (on "how we are seduced by the objects around us"), as well as monographs and biographies.

Nina Tandon studies ways to use electrical signals to grow artificial tissues for transplants and other therapies.

Nina Tandon studies electrical signaling in the context of tissue engineering, with the goal of creating “spare parts” for human implantation and/or disease models. After receiving a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Cooper Union, Nina worked on an electronic nose used to “smell” lung cancer as a Fulbright scholar in Rome. She studied electrical stimulation for cardiac tissue engineering at MIT and Columbia, and now continues her research on electrical stimulation for broader tissue-engineering applications. Tandon was a 2011 TED Fellow and a 2012 Senior Fellow.

TED University: Session 1Mon Jun 25, 20124:15 – 5:45

Don TapscottDigital strategist

Don Tapscott can see the future coming ... and works to identify the new concepts we need to understand in a world transformed by the Internet.

Don Tapscott takes a farseeing look at our digital, connected, hypercollaborative world. He's the CEO of Tapscott group and is the Founder and Chairman of Global Solution Networks.

He is an adjunct professor at Rotman School of Management, the Inaugural Fellow at the Martin Prosperity Institute , and the Chancellor of Trent University.

In 2013, Thinkers50 listed Don as the 4th most important business thinker in the world. In 2015, he was appointed Senior Adviser to the World Economic Forum and to the Advisory Committee of WISeKey, a world-leading e-security company.

In his most recent works, he thinks deeply about newly possible collaboration "on an astronomical scale." As the Industrial Age comes to an end, all our institutions are challenged (state, corporations, schools), he argues--and suggests that we need to reboot and reinvent civilization.

A magician and illusionist for the 21st century, Marco Tempest blends cutting-edge technology with the flair and showmanship of Houdini.

Marco Tempest’s imaginative combination of computer-generated imagery, quick-cut video and enthusiastic stage presence has earned him a place in the pantheon of great illusionists. At 22, the Swiss magician won the New York World Cup of Magic, launching him into international prominence. His lively phonecam postings on YouTube , done without post-production and video-editing tricks to astonished people on the street, get millions of views. At the MIT Media Lab, Tempest is researching the link between magic and technology as a Director's Fellow.

Through his art, Tempest creates a highly entertaining way to be entranced by the reality-bending tech magic that surrounds us all every day. Watch more Marco magic courtesy of Scobleizer ... or see Marco profiled on CNN.com's Next List.

He says: "I blend the line between what is incredibly real and what is incredibly not."

Julian Treasure studies sound and advises businesses on how best to use it.

Julian Treasure is the chair of the Sound Agency, a firm that advises worldwide businesses -- offices, retailers, hotels -- on how to use sound. He asks us to pay attention to the sounds that surround us. How do they make us feel: productive, stressed, energized, acquisitive?

Treasure is the author of the book Sound Business and keeps a blog by the same name that ruminates on aural matters (and offers a nice day-by-day writeup of TEDGlobal 2009). In the early 1980s, Treasure was the drummer for the Fall-influenced band Transmitters.

TED University: Session 2Tues Jun 26, 20128:45 – 10:15

Jonathan TrentScientist and biofuel guru

Not only does Jonathan Trent grow algae for biofuel, he wants to do so by cleansing wastewater and trapping carbon dioxide in the process. And it’s all solar-powered.

Jonathan Trent works at NASA’s nanotechnology department, where he builds microscopic devices out of proteins from extremophiles -- bacteria that live in the world’s harshest environments. It isn’t the logical place to start a biofuel project. But in 2008, after watching enzymes chomp through plant cells, Trent started thinking about biofuels. And, because he has a background in marine biology, he started thinking about algae and the oceans.

Thus was born OMEGA, or the Offshore Membrane Enclosure for Growing Algae. This technology aims at re-using the wastewater of coastal cities that is currently piped out and disposed into the seas. Fueled by the sun and carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, the algae eat the waste and produce oils that can be converted to fuel. Unlike growing corn for ethanol, OMEGA doesn’t threaten the world’s food supply.

Fiction writer Karen Thompson Walker explores the connection between fear and the imagination.

In Karen Thompson Walker's 2012 book The Age of Miracles, a young girl and her family awake one morning to discover that the rotation of the Earth has suddenly begun to slow, stretching the length of the 24-hour day and throwing the natural world into disarray. It's a big, speculative book, but at heart, it's a simple human drama, told through the eyes of an observant adolescent girl.

A former book editor at Simon & Schuster, Walker worked on the novel for three years, an hour each morning before work. Fun fact: The Age of Miracles was published on June 21, 2012 -- the longest day of the year. Since then, the bestselling, much-awarded book has been translated into 29 languages.

Ruby Wax is a loud, funny woman -- who spent much of her comedy career battling depression in silence. Now her work blends mental health advocacy and laughs.

Winston Churchill called it "the Black Dog" -- a depression that settled over him and drained the flavor from life. Ruby Wax knows the Black Dog well; throughout the '80s and '90s, during a flourishing career as a brash comedian and interviewer in the UK, it trotted at her heels, even while she was interviewing the Duchess of York and sorting through Imelda Marcos' shoes.

After taking a timeout to learn how to manage the condition, Wax produced a stand-up comedy show called "Losing It" that directly addresses her mental health experiences, hilariously but powerfully. And she's started up a new social network called the Black Dog Tribe, which offers a community and support to people with depression. Meanwhile, she's working on her Master's in cognitive therapy.

Also, this year, Ruby was honored as an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for her mental health work.

As she says: "I've always said to myself, if you've got a disability, use it." Read our Q&A with Ruby Wax >>

Imagine the discoveries that could result from a giant pool of freely available health and genomic data. John Wilbanks is working to build it.

Performing a medical or genomic experiment on a human requires informed consent and careful boundaries around privacy. But what if the data that results, once scrubbed of identifying marks, was released into the wild? At WeConsent.us, John Wilbanks thinks through the ethical and procedural steps to create an open, massive, mine-able database of data about health and genomics from many sources. One step: the Portable Legal Consent for Common Genomics Research (PLC-CGR), an experimental bioethics protocol that would allow any test subject to say, "Yes, once this experiment is over, you can use my data, anonymously, to answer any other questions you can think of." Compiling piles of test results in one place, Wilbanks suggests, would turn genetic info into big data--giving researchers the potential to spot patterns that simply aren't viewable up close.

In February 2013, the US government responded to a We the People petition spearheaded by Wilbanks and signed by 65,000 people, and announced a plan to open up taxpayer-funded research data and make it available for free.